After Me/Ontopolitics: Post-Socialist Necroecologies in a Non-Philosophical Key

Abstract

The complex relationality between inheritance of the socialist past, the socioeconomic transitional present characterised by extractivist capitalism, and a future marked by species extinction, produces post-socialist necroecologies. On one hand, relationally devastating resource extraction produces necroecological non-becoming through its meontopolitics; on the other hand, there are mass movements calling for the cessation of that extraction and for an ontopolitics of becoming other than those causing environmental destruction.
 This article concerns the non-philosophical reduction of the metaphysical presuppositions of these environmental material-semiotic practices in contemporary Serbia, showing that they are grounded in ontological pairs of non-becoming and becoming. To think about the post-socialist necroecological material-semiotic condition in a non-philosophical key means thinking about it neither relationally nor non-relationally, neither through non-becoming or becoming, but unilaterally, through heno-humaneity and beyond Western metaphysics.